Monday, July 1, 2019

Huawei's Ren Zhengfei Predicts Trump's Defeat in 2020?

Another pause in the U.S.-China trade war was announced by Trump over the weekend at the G20 meeting in Osaka. Analysts are already dismissing the truce as inconsequential since a ceasefire has been announced before (the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires last fall) to no avail.

A main sticking point in the negotiations is the U.S. blacklisting Huawei. The company is said to be far ahead of any competitor in bringing 5G technology, the next generation of mobile internet, to market. 

Trump relented in Osaka and announced that U.S. firms could once again sell component parts to Huawei without first obtaining a waiver from the government.

Huawei has been holding its own in the trade war. According to Raymond Zhong in "As Trump and Xi Talk Trade, Huawei Will Loom Large":
[A] few weeks ago, China began issuing commercial 5G licenses to mobile carriers, ahead of the schedule that many observers had expected. Analysts at J.P. Morgan called the move an attempt “by the government to assure the world about China’s capability to push forward 5G.” China’s state-run telecom operators have also signed agreements to buy 5G gear from Huawei.
“They can survive,” Xiaomeng Lu of Access Partnership, a policy consulting firm, said of Huawei. The company will just have to stand more firmly on China’s side of the increasingly “splintered” world of tech, Ms. Lu said. “The U.S. only picks suppliers they trust, and China will pick suppliers they trust.”
Zhong quotes Huawei's founder Ren Zhengfei in what looks to be a prediction of Trump's defeat in 2020:
Huawei’s leaders do not seem to believe that China and the United States are heading for a permanent divorce.

At an event last week, the firm’s founder and chief executive, Ren Zhengfei, predicted that business would be tough for the next two years. But he said he hoped to resume working with American partners in the not-too-distant future.

“We are not afraid of using American components,” Mr. Ren said. “We are not afraid of working with any American people.”

No comments:

Post a Comment